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Channel 4’s Utopia was one of my favorite pieces of media of 2013. The series follows a group of average people who know each other through a web forum dedicated to a comic book called Utopia. As the events of the comic unfold in real life, the characters swept up in an Invisibles conspiracy adventure. Unlike most series about comic fans, this a dark, edgy thriller, not a campy sitcom.

There’s a question at the heart of Utopia that I can’t answer, which is, with a burgeoning population, what do we do? I have lots of answers for lots of the world’s problems, and no-one ever asks me so they’re still going on [sighs. Everyone laughs]. For this one, I don’t have an answer because my slightly lefty liberal sensibilities just cannot offer anything. There’s talk about birth-rates going down, but our birth-rate went from 2.7 to 2.4 in the last fourteen years and we still produced another billion people. Even if the birth-rate does lower to 2.2 or 2.3 we’ll still be producing another billion in twenty years and it’s just a fucking nightmare. Phosphates are not going to last, we’re not going to be able to feed this amount of people. I don’t have an answer to that. I don’t think that Utopia’s going to come up with an answer for that, and I think if the world looks to Utopia for an answer to that, we’re really in trouble, but to me that makes it interesting, because it’s difficult and I don’t understand it.

You can stream the whole series from the Channel 5 site if you’re in the UK. If you’re outside the UK you’ll have to get a little more… creative… if you want to watch the show. Oh, and HBO has the rights to do a remake of the series, with David Fincher and Rian Johnson possibly attached.